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Intel has released public details on the next generation of the x86 architecture. Arriving first in our 2013 Intel microarchitecture codename "Haswell", the new instructions accelerate a broad category of applications and usage models.

Planned for 2013, products codenamed "Haswell" will be Intel's third step - after the 2nd Generation Intel Core technology with "Ivy Bridge" 22nm chips in 2012 - toward achieving the Ultrabook, Intel's vision of a laptop that combines best-in-class performance, improved responsiveness and security in a thin form factor.

The mobile version of Haswell will be Intel's first system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed for the mainstream laptop market. SoCs are typically used in smartphone and tablets, due to their compact size. Intel has hinted that Haswell will change the mainstream laptop thermal design point by reducing the microprocessor power to half of today's design point.

Of course, Haswell will also pack Intel's graphics inside, which means that the new devices such as the Ultrabooks will not require any extra graphics silicon from companies like Nvidia or AMD.

Mark Buxton, software engineer at Intel, provided some technical details related to the Haswell microarchitecture. The new instructions are build upon the instructions coming in Intel microarchitecture code name Ivy Bridge, including the digital random number generator, half-float (float16) accelerators, and extend the Intel Advanced Vector extensions (Intel AVX) that launched in 2011.

Buxton emphasises on Intel's Advanced Vector Extensions 2 or AVX2. Here is how the AVX2 instructions are described:

Of course, it will take some time until we see how all these technical enhancements are translated into silicon and whether these new chips would handle various tasks better than Nvidia's and AMD's graphics chips.